Seagate ships hard drives with encryption

Seagate Technology on Monday plans to announce the first manufacturer to sell laptop PCs with Seagate's new hard drive that has built-in encryption technology.

Fremont, Calif.-based ASI Computer Technologies will start selling computers equipped with Seagate's Momentus 5400 FDE.2 drive next month, Seagate said in a statement. The computers, called ASI C8015, will be sold through a number of ASI's partners, including Newegg.com, PowerNotebooks.com and ZipZoomfly.com, an ASI representative said.

In addition to an 80GB Seagate drive, the ASI machine will feature a fingerprint reader, 15.4-inch display, Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile 2.0GHz processor, Nvidia graphics with 256MB memory, 1GB RAM and a DVD rewritable drive, according to ASI. The price is expected to be about $2,150.

The Momentus 5400 FDE.2 offers up to 160GB of capacity, a Serial ATA interface, and hardware-based Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption, according to Seagate. ASI will ship its laptop with Wave Systems' management software to simplify enterprise use of the computers, it said.